New dinosaur Xenovenator espinosai, apparently a dome-headed troodontid: www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/18... 🪶🧪 (📷Rivera-Sylva et al.)

It's found to be a sister taxon to Zalmoxes & Ferenceratops in the Bayesian tree. Much of the skull rear is known from the former (the parietals and squamosals form a deep wedge, but don't extend into a true "frill"), allowing it to serve as the basis for the missing parts of the Ajkaceratops skull.

Funkyceratops.mp4

Some days ago I made a thread on Pleistocene crocs in honor of Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, and now I'm bringing it here too. Let me prefice this by saying that I of course understand their absence, obviously more unique fauna takes priority and I don't begrudge the team their choice

#3157 A helpful tutorial

some of the "written" passages are completely unhinged, "Its discovery highlights Australia’s unique role in reshaping the boundaries between myth and science." is it an all-year april fool?

@jorgoristevski.bsky.social just alterted me to this absolutely horrible page of false AI slop being passed off as an educational page on the Queensland Museum website. www.museum.qld.gov.au/learn-and-di... 1/n

A couple more reptiles I want to appear in PhP Ice Age are Paludirex and Quinkana. Megalania and the saltwater crocodile weren’t the only large predatory reptiles of Pleistocene Australia. Here I’m going to focus on Paludirex.

doi.org/10.1098/rsos... new paper out now with @royalsociety.org on limb structure & function of the #fossil #kangaroo, Dorcopsoides fossilis, from central Australia. The oldest known macropodine (subfamily of all but one of living roos) & a fun glimpse into the great Late Miocene kangaroo radiation

Some new research on the Alcoota Wallaby has just been published. I've excavated scores of bones of this animal over the years - it is great to see them get some attention. Congratulations Isaac! news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2025/11... #Miocene #Alcoota #AustralianWildlife

Check out this new paper about crocodylian, likely mekosuchine, eggshell fragments from the Eocene of Queensland. Great to see this material finally published. doi.org/10.1080/0272...

Some tideous studies for an upcoming illustration of a certain fragmentary Wakaleo Species, perhaps the youngest of them... Credit to gtg141 on DeviantArt for the W. schouteni and W. oldfieldi skull reconstruction as helpful guides to doing my own reconstruction of W. alcootaensis. #sciart

Barinasuchus arveloi: as an animal, you just cannot get any cooler than this #paleoart

this has to be one of the cutest animals ever

New #watercolor - the skull that launched a thousand papers - Aetiocetus weltoni, the ~25 myo toothed baleen whale that likely had teeth and baleen - from the Oligocene of Oregon. I started this last winter and only finally finished it yesterday. 🐡 🦖🐬 #sciart #whaleontology #whalewednesday #art

(Recent art) Ceratodus nargan Illustration! Ceratodus is a wide spread prehistoric lungfish species that is related to the extant queensland lungfish. Here lies a species in the Early Cretaceous of Southern Victoria, Australia, in the Euremella formation. #paleoart #sciart #illustraation #fishart

Tiliqua frangens from a few years ago, planning to redo some of it soon

Day 28 of #Croctober, we're racing towards the finish line This is one of my favourite images of Dakosaurus for two reasons Reason 1: it nicely shows just how enormous this animal got Reason 2: it also shows how stupidly tiny its arms were Photo by Sven Sachs ft. Joschua Knüppe

Replica skeleton of Baru iylwenpeny on display at the Queensland Museum. This is part of the new Croc! exhibit. #MuseumCore #CrocQM

The earliest appearance of gigantic lamniform #sharks has now been pushed back by ~15 Ma (upper Aptian, ~115 Ma) with the discovery of enormous cardabiodontid shark remains from northern Australia.🦈🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Lets keep this going on Day 26 of #Croctober Simosuchus was not the only notosuchian with complex teeth. Look no further than Pakasuchus, which straight up just mirrors mammalian dentition down to the grinding molars. Illustrations by Smokeybjb and Zina Deretsky

This is also a great chance to plug Joschua Knüppe's Crocodile poster, which features (almost) every extinct croc knocking around in the Pleistocene Tho be patient, as soon as the Lemuria project is over I'll pester him to add C. sudani, completing the set t.co/xVzxczcgKr

Also worth mentioning that Paludirex takes its name from the etymology of Pallimnarchus, which was a frequently used but poorly defined mekosuchine genus eventually regarded as dubious given that the lacklustre remains

Paludirex is such a cool name! Credit goes to Adam Yates for coming up with the name Paludirex, he was one of my co-authors on that paper.

Princess Parrots Illustration! A personal gift to my girlfriend. It has alot of symbolism and meaning. 2 Princess Parrots arrive at a lonesome young bovine skull. Admist the windswept views of the spinifex plains, a looming storm encroaches from the distance. #birdart#birdillustration#Illustration

Skeleton (cast) of the giant flightless bird Dromornis from the Miocene of Australia. Part of a traveling exhibit on tyrannosaurs currently at the Grand Rapids Public Museum. #FossilFriday

#Croctober Day 17 Remember Euthecodon from day 15? Well the most recent fossils come from the Lake Turkana basin of Kenya, an environment it shared with the massive Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni, an animal that may have preyed on our ancestors. Photos by Yang Deming & Nick Perry

Everyone posts pics of the toothy end of a Deinosuchus but nobody ever appreciates all the hard work we put into it's booty, including all those fiddly osteiderms

I feel like me and @dantheclamman.blog vs The Onion is the plucky underdog story that the world needs

Rudolph Zallinger's Kronosaurus, done for the beloved 1960s Brooke Bond Dinosaurs tea card series, never fails to make me laugh. Why's he flopping around in the shallows? Can he get back into the water? It's surely meant to look intimidating and scary, but I just feel bad for the poor thing!

In the final hours of #WorldFossilDay please enjoy some very real Olenellus trilobites being visited by my massive bronze reconstruction including all the legs and gills. #sciart

Provably one for @sophiesaurus98.bsky.social but while going through some boxes in my attic I found my childhood copy of John Man’s Dinosaur, which features some classic Palaeoart, as well as some rather lovely model photography. I might have found the reason I like so much foliage in my displays 😅

For #Croctober Day 11 we got Confractosuchus (art by Julius Csotonyi) Confracto once inhabited the Winton Formation of Australia, but unlike the tiny Isisfordia was sizable enough to even feed on dinosaurs. Which we know because we found the bones of an elasmarian in its stomach

Outcrop Absolutely fascinated by the huge sandstone outcrops on Aussie's Southern Coast. Reminded my of the hoodoos of the American West, only much bigger and ... outcroppier. (That's a word now. :P ) - Southern Coast, #Australia, for #FornPartsFridays - #Scape #EastCoastKin #Landscape #Travel

I can't wait to get bitten again by this absolute stunner so I can take more photos like this one! Soon, very soon 🤩 Beautiful bloodsucker. Sabethes mosquito from the Ecuadorian Amazon in mid-bite. This photo was highly commended in the 57th Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition in 2021.

Or formatted a paper for JVP

An unexpected positive of our truck breaking down in the outback was being able to make Science Week in Alice Springs. Such a cool set of events showcasing some of the amazing science going on in the NT. Special thanks to @reddirtpalaeo.bsky.social for putting up with my molecular palaeo questions!

This is the first time in a while that I've had time to draw for fun, so for an early #SundayFishSketch, I finished my drawing of an Atlantic Silver Hatchetfish 🐡

Birds are such a strange kind of dinosaur, we would be astonished by them if they weren't around us all the time. Goblin-like puppeteers behind a screen of feathers, as described by Gary W. Kaiser in his book The Inner Bird.

Voay robustus! a recently extinct species of crocodile from Madagascar, most of its remains were found in a "sub-fossil" state, where not enough time has passed for them to fossilize suggested by @convictclaude.bsky.social! who surely apreciates me calling it a 𝙃𝙤𝙧𝙣𝙮 𝘾𝙧𝙤𝙘𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙡𝙚

Some quick illustrations of the small crocodilian Dongnanosuchus hsui, an orientalosuchin from the mid to late Eocene of China. Like its relatives, it had a fairly short and robust head that was also pretty small. #sciart #dongnanosuchus #orientalosuchina

Lately I've been more focused on sculpting than 2D , but I felt like doing something fast to keep practice going. A Mekosuchinae indet. inspired by the latest study on its presence in Papua New Guinea. I really need to refocus on painting man. #crocodilia

Words to live by, I suppose.